Thirty-round mag,
Think about it. Ever look in a closet or under the bed, when you’re alone in the house, to ensure an intruder isn’t hiding there? Now, if you really believed the Man in the Black Ski Mask was lurking...
There was a time when I didn’t seem to need such things, when I would have been amused and perhaps even vaguely disgusted at the notion of living like some sort of psychic vampire, a lingering revenan...
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults;...
The person who returns from living abroad isn't the same person who left originally... Your outlook changes. You don't take things for granted that you used to. For instance, I noticed in New York tha...
The owner of a coffee shop sat diminished in the back of his deserted establishment, waiting for patronage that had long since vanished.
The essence of samurai is not just service, but loyalty to his master, to a cause greater than himself.
Strangeland’s confidence in her, the risks she was willing to run . . . it was all producing a roiling mess of emotion she couldn’t deal with right now. She managed to push it away and handed
She’d always assumed that what she kept buried down deep was imperceptible to the people around her. But she hadn’t ever pressure checked the notion the way it might be pressure checked now.
She spun and faced me, one hand on her wounded posterior. Her eyes were wide, her nostrils flared with shock and anger. In my peripheral vision, I saw her weight shift to her back leg, and thought she...
She remembered something her mother had told her when she was a teenager: The boy you date is different from the boy you’re engaged to, the boy you’re engaged to is different from the man you marry, t...
Seriously protecting yourself calls for the annihilation of ties with society, ties that most people need the way they need oxygen.
People put out signals—body language, gait, clothes, facial expression, posture, attitude, speech, mannerisms—that can tell you where they’re from, what they do, who they are. Most importantly, do the...
My mother would have wanted me to say a prayer, crossing myself at its conclusion, and had this been her grave, I would have done so. But such a western ritual would have been an insult to my father i...
It’s like America, he went on. I mean look at us, we’re always telling ourselves how peace-loving we are. ‘We’re a peace-loving people, we love peace.’ I guess that’s why we spend more on our military...
In the last six months, he went on, there have been two deaths, apparently by suicide. The victims were both high-level banking executives in soon-to-be merged institutions. Each seems to have leaped...
I wiped water from my face and thought, Time to go. But I remained. Thanks for an interesting evening, she said, after a pause. You’re not a bad guy, for a stalker. I gave her a half smile. That’s wha...
I told myself it was all right, I wasn’t disappointed, it was better this way. I wondered in a detached way whether it was all part of some cosmic punishment for Crazy Jake, the blood brother I had ki...
I thought of an expression my father had once told me: Be good to people on your way up. You may meet them again on your way down.
I felt like Schrödinger’s cat. She would come, or not come. She would take me in, or throw me out. She would forgive me, or tell me to fuck off. And in that narrow, purgatorial space, a feeling crept...